BI Dashboards Make Sales and Marketing Magic at UniCredit

Customer Profile

UniCredit dates back to 1473 with the birth of Rolo Banca. Today, after a merger with nine of the largest Italian banks, UniCredit has become one of the largest financial groups in Europe. UniCredit currently has 9,500 branches in 22 countries with 160,000 employees.

Challenges

Unicredit's analysts needed Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) data to evaluate the bank's competitive position in each country where it had operations. But the data arrived too late, usually two weeks after the financial period closed. "We needed a system that offered timely insights in response to ever-changing market conditions," said Enrica Daolio, special project manager of UniCredit's global transaction banking. "So we involved MicroStrategy in the study for a new solution.

"With the previous solution," continued Daolio, "we couldn't query the system accurately without having to surf through data, we didn't have information in an aggregate and immediate form, and above all, we couldn't obtain the most significant key performance indicator (KPI) trends."

Solution

To test the benefits of a business intelligence (BI) solution, UniCredit experts – working alongside MicroStrategy consultants – developed an initial set of dashboards.

"Starting the project in May," said Daolio, "we were able to create a demonstration using real data at the beginning of September. The result went far beyond our expectations. Top management not only approved the introduction of BI, they asked us to speed up development. Hence BI4Sales came about, such an amazing tool that it seemed almost magic.

"The BI4Sales application, with its dashboard user interface, have enormously increased our ability to monitor business trends and our clients' portfolio performance. This has helped the sales department single out critical areas and supply our management with both overall and detailed views that allow a better understanding of the client base. BI4Sales has drastically reduced analysis time."

Furthermore, according to Daolio, "the dashboards allow us to consolidate numbers, metrics and performance scorecards in a single window. They can be designed for a specific function and visualize metric templates that favor a single point of view. As they are extremely efficient, the BI dashboards can extract data from heterogeneous sources and present it in a tailored way."

The MicroStrategy Difference

Business intelligence has therefore allowed the creation of a strong and flexible tool for the analysis of market data, useful both for sales and for marketing, immediately available for all 22 networks in which the group is present as well as top management in the home office. Consulting and analysis capabilities are expanded both on a market and functional level (cash managers benefit as much as trade finance, country and marketing managers).

BI4Sales allows for a summary of the most important information so that it is immediately understandable thanks to the dashboard technology. It also allows users to drill deeply in order to refine their analysis and understand market dynamics.

A member of UniCredit's Trade Finance & Services team concludes, "The collection, analysis and interpretation of SWIFT data has always been a slow and heavygoing process as it is an essentially manual operation, although data has always been available in electronic form. What our project management in Italy has realized through the tools of business intelligence has gone way beyond my expectations. Now it is not only possible to obtain data automatically and instantly, but with BI a new level of quality has been added. We can extract absolute and also relative data, both useful when planning commercial action. In conclusion, we have an incredibly useful tool that allows us to add value to the process of product and sales development. Thanks!"

Seconds a transactional sales manager: "The business intelligence of BI4Sales supplies immediate feedback on volume, value and market share. It is a user-friendly web application and it has remarkably improved access to market indicators. Its flexibility allows sales and management to quickly understand market trends. Furthermore, it eases cross-selling operations between different geographical areas thanks to integration of data from different sources."

"The adoption of business intelligence," notes Daolio, "has not only given us a far more efficient and competitive system, but it has also made us change our viewpoint, and grow on organizational and methodological fronts. From this perspective, MicroStrategy's technological and consulting contribution has been fundamental. In order to build these important dashboards, we have had to invest in knowledge, learn to read data in a different way and enable a smoother flow of information within the company. The same information important to the sales department is also essential for marketing managers who now, for example, can define client clusters and analyze the efficiency of marketing campaigns."

Currently, data relative to the market and clients are used for varying levels of analysis (such as time, region and by currency). BI4Sales also gives a precise idea of value, volume and market share of every product for region and country. Data harmonization has also brought about a greater understanding of the dynamics and performance regarding targets established between different products and markets. The project's first phase produced dynamic dashboards and interactive reports accessible via the web. Encouraged by the results, UniCredit is already considering next steps. The goal? Further technological innovations with even more sophisticated and intuitive analysis.